


Shuriken

by Janet_Coleman_Sides



Category: Kagaku Ninja Tai Gatchaman | Science Ninja Team Gatchaman
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Hope, M/M, Near Death Experience, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 01:08:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Janet_Coleman_Sides/pseuds/Janet_Coleman_Sides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eagle Ken, mourning the loss of Joe, finds a forgotten shuriken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shuriken

Ken steps inside his squalid shack of an airbase, pulling the ill-fitting door shut behind him. The night is cold with the shivering bite of fall. Swirling leaves pry at the windows. And Joe's dead.

Under his arm is a bag. In the bag is a six of beer. He hasn't bothered with food. He hasn't bothered with a lot lately.

And Joe is dead.

Everywhere he turns, every thought he thinks, he rams into that fact still. It has been seven months since Cross Karakoram. And his heart became, on that day, the very black hole Sosai X wanted, and that Joe died to prevent. And Joe's death caused it. And so, and so. 

Ken starts drinking. Slowly. He doesn't want to be sick. He just wants to feel less. 

He paces around the wretched rooms. He hasn't looked at anything here in more than just the last miserable months. The accumulated dust bespeaks years of neglect. His eye falls on a small black case.

It turns out to contain darts. Ryu got them for him one Christmas, and Jinpei a dartboard, found used at a yard sale. It had been rather _too_ used, really, and was hard to use for play as the darts would keep falling out.

Ken finishes the second beer, cracks the third, and looks for the dartboard. Where was it? Right, it was hanging behind the closet door, which had been sitting open forever, a pile of clothes blocking it and towels hung over it so that you could scarcely tell there was a door there. He kicks the pile aside, adds the towels to it and shuts the closet door; the dartboard swings gently on its nail.

Ken's heart constricts, crushed by gravity. Yes, Jinpei, there is such a thing as a singularity.

A white feather shuriken sticks out of the board. Bull's-eye.

Not _quite_ dead center -- in the second ring.

Joe had won the last game and had shown off by using a shuriken --

Ken gasps, eyes flooding. Loneliness, aching, utter loneliness fills him. _JOE_. 

Joe had only needed one more cork to win at bar cricket, so he'd only taken one, by hitting the second ring. "I win! Of course. Man, this board sucks. Nice try on the kid's part, though. Maybe next year he'll find you a pool table, only missing one leg."

Ken had aimed a swat at Joe's shoulder as he went out to replenish his beer, but had laughed right along with him. And later he had opened the closet to get something, and there the shuriken had stayed, trapped behind the door like a moment in time.

Trapped until now. The tears well up to blur his vision and then spill, rivulets running down to soak the neck of his shirt. He reaches up and pulls the shuriken out. As his fingers close on it it occurs to Ken that the last fingers to touch this were Joe's. 

The point gleams. He holds it up, squints at it. Joe's shuriken were always poisoned, though the KNT were always immunized against such things, it didn't protect them completely. He wonders if the poison might still be viable enough to kill. He wonders if he is even still resistant to what must surely be an old formula, for it has changed several times...

Catches himself thinking this. Waits for his conscience to chide him about duty. 

His conscience says nothing. 

Slowly, reverently, Ken lifts the shuriken to his lips. His mind's eye sees Joe doing this so many times, that feather hanging out of his mouth like some old-style movie star's cigarette. 

But it feels obscene to be aping Joe this way, not a tribute but a mockery. A sting nicks his tongue, from a point so sharp it's barely felt. He snatches it out of his mouth again, gulps from the beer in his other hand to clear the faint metallic taste in his nearly-numb mouth.

Ken twirls the lethal quill between his fingers, staring at it, brimming eyes vague and haunted. There's blood on it. He ignores it.

Aloud he says, "Did you know what I meant? The boomerang? Did you understand, Joe? Boomerangs... come back -- oh g-god --" He squeezes his eyes shut, wringing out a fresh river of tears. The awful enormity of it. The absolute finality of it! _I will never see you again. Not ever._

"Why couldn't we have died together?" he asks the shuriken, clutching it like a talisman or a microphone into the nether world. His words are slurring badly now. "Will we meet again -- another life? Please, Joe. Come back..."

But Joe didn't believe in reincarnation. He'd said so to Ken. "You get one race. Once around. That's all."

Ken nods to himself, sits cross-legged on the floor facing the dartboard. A rushing numbness sweeps down his limbs. He crumples, motor control abruptly cut. But he still clutches the feather as he fades to black.

***************

_At the first gate, they take his helmet._

"What is this you are doing to me?"

"Most strangely are the laws of the nether world effected. Owashi no Ken, do not question the laws of the nether world."

At the second gate, they take his gloves.

At the third, his boots.

"What is this you are doing to me?"

"Most strangely are the laws of the nether world effected. Owashi no Ken, do not question the laws of the nether world."

At the fourth gate they want his wings, fifth and sixth render him naked. 

"What is this you are doing to me?"

"Most strangely are the laws of the nether world effected. Owashi no Ken, do not question the laws of the nether world."

And each time he submits, a wide-eyed sleepwalker. 

But at the seventh gate they want the shuriken.

"No! This you may not take."

"Most strangely are the laws of the nether world effected. Owashi no Ken, do not question the laws of the nether world."

He tries not to give it to them, but it is suddenly gone, slicing his fingers with its absence. The one thing -- !!

Then Ken is led into a tomb. He can see nothing. 

There is a voice. "Why have you come, Owashi no Ken? Your death is by sword, not shuriken, and it is not today."

"Give him back to me."

"Why?"

"I need him. Give him back..."

"Why?" Thrice asked, now.

"Most strangely are the laws of the heart effected," Ken snaps in bitter mimicry. "O disembodied voice, do not question my heart."

"But, Owashi no Ken, that is precisely what happens here. The laws of the nether world... The heart weighed against the feather."

The shuriken appears in the air before him. Its tip is smeared with his blood.

Beside it appears the birdrang, as it was the last time he saw it, when Jinpei picked it up. It too is stained: Joe's blood.

A scales weighs them, one against the other. They hover in perfect balance.

"Well?" says Ken.

"Do you understand, Owashi no Ken?"

"No."

"If you did not love him, you would not be here. If he did not love you, the scales would not balance."

The blood on the birdrang, which had at first appeared dried to brown streaks, glistens redly.

"Owashi no Ken, the one you seek is not here. Go back. Go back and live until you die. Your duties call you; your friends call you; your Other calls you; can you hear them...?"

Ken rears back, eyes wide, feeling the sickening slide of 'earthquake' rippling through his conciousness. His head throbs, fiercely. 

"Wait -- wait!" But he thrashes into a wall in the dark, a great slamming blow that sends him spinning through it, screaming. A streaming river of sparks separates, coalescing vaguely into rising bubbles of disjointed images, most of them gone before he can focus on them. 

Flash. Something dropping into a tray. A bullet? 

Flash. Spinning cockpit view: the G-1 going down in flames. 

Flash. Joe's face, bareheaded, above Jun's helmet, eyes filling with tears as she clings to him crying.

The bubbles fizzle into nonsense, burning in his blood like nitrogen. Surfacing quickly from where he has gone is every bit as painful as the bends. He threw himself into the Sea, and it has thrown him back!

***************

Many hours later, cramped and cold, Ken wakes on the floor, trembling with hangover and poison. He crawls to the bed, sleeps dreamlessly for most of a day, surfacing only once to gulp water, handful upon handful, then return to his cocoon for more blessed unconsciousness.

He remembers very little of the vision, but the flashes of deja vu remain to haunt him for many months.

He sticks the shuriken, heedless of the dried blood striping it, back into the dartboard. He stares at it, thinking vaguely about the birdrang... Opens the door, kicks the pile of clothes back into their customary place before it. Re-drapes the towels. 

And goes on with living, though his heart drags at him like a ball and chain.

_Come back_ , he'd thought, fiercely, as he jabbed the feather in hard, so that it would stick into the hole-riddled cork.

Bull's-eye.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Maia_ , by Richard Adams, is my favorite book in all the world. The chant with the repeating lines "most strangely are the laws of the nether world effected" is from Occula's prayer about Kantza-Merada.


End file.
